Tag Archives: small population

Introduction

One of the challenges for corpus linguists is that many of the distinctions that we wish to make are either not annotated in a corpus at all or, if they are represented in the annotation, unreliably annotated. This issue frequently arises in corpora to which an algorithm has been applied, but where the results have not been checked by linguists, a situation which is unavoidable with mega-corpora. However, this is a general problem. We would always recommend that cases be reviewed for accuracy of annotation.

A version of this issue also arises when checking for the possibility of alternation, that is, to ensure that items of Type A can be replaced by Type B items, and vice-versa. An example might be epistemic modal shall vs. will. Most corpora, including richly-annotated corpora such as ICE-GB and DCPSE, do not include modal semantics in their annotation scheme. In such cases the issue is not that the annotation is “imperfect”, rather that our experiment relies on a presumption that the speaker has the choice of either type at any observed point (see Aarts et al. 2013), but that choice is conditioned by the semantic content of the utterance.

Introduction

Inferential statistics is a methodology of extrapolation from data. It rests on a mathematical model which allows us to predict values in the population based on observations in a sample drawn from that population.

Central to this methodology is the idea of reporting not just the observation itself but also the certainty of that observation. In some cases we can observe the population directly and make statements about it.

We can cite the 10 most frequent words in Shakespeare’s First Folio with complete certainty (allowing for spelling variations). Such statements would simply be facts.

Similarly, we could take a corpus like ICE-GB and report that in it, there are 14,275 adverbs ending in -ly out of 1,061,263 words.

Provided that we limit the scope of our remarks to the corpus itself, we do not need to worry about degrees of certainty because these statements are simply facts. Statements about the corpus are sometimes called descriptive statistics (the word statistic here being used in its most general sense, i.e. a number). Continue reading →